Jeff chewed on hard cinnamon candies as he drove, and the sound coming from his closed mouth was so loud and chaotic it occurred to Mira that he was splintering his teeth, but when she looked over at him, and he looked back at her and smiled, she was relieved to see that his teeth were intact. “Would you like some?” he asked, pointing to the bag of candies between them. “Help yourself.”
“No, thanks,” Mira said.
After they’d left Godwin Hall, and before they’d gone to get Jeff’s car from the university parking garage, they’d gone back to Mira’s apartment so she could get her credit card. (Despite Clark’s protests that she was treating him like a two-year-old, Mira had insisted on keeping their joint card at home, in a box at the bottom of their bureau, since they were already so deeply in debt that it could only, in her opinion, be used in emergencies.) But when she’d gotten to the bureau, to the bottom of the drawer, and then to the bottom of the box, it wasn’t there.
Clark had taken that, too?
She’d called to Jeff in the other room, “I’ll be right out!” as she pawed through a few other drawers, and even looked under the bed, and went to the closet to check the pockets of Clark’s jackets.
Not there.
She could hear Jeff in the living room humming to himself as he paged through some of the books on her shelf.
Now what?
It was two hundred miles, at least a couple of tanks of gas there and back. She’d had the ATM withdrawal maximum lowered to fifty dollars a day (again, so there would be no temptations), and she certainly didn’t want to make Jeff stand around in line at the credit union as she tried to get money out of hers and Clark’s savings account.
“I’m sorry this is taking so long!” she called, mostly to buy herself some time to think about what to do.
“It’s not a problem, Mira,” Jeff called back. “I’ve got forty hours before anyone will notice I’m missing, and that’ll just be a dozen relieved undergrads. That’s the great thing about being a bachelor. Nobody files a Missing Person’s report for at least a week. Hey, I see you’ve got a whole shelf of Camille Paglia. Are you a fan?”
Later, Mira thought, she would tell him about her interest in Paglia’s popularization of literary criticism, and how she hoped, herself, to emulate something of it in her own anthropological studies—but at the moment she was back on her hands and knees feeling the carpet under the bureau for the credit card. She sat for a few minutes on the floor before she stood, went into the living room, and said to Jeff, because she had to, “I don’t have any money. Except what I can get out of the bank. My husband took the credit card.”
Jeff was holding Sexual Personae in his hands as if it he’d never held an actual book before, as if he had no idea how to open it, both hands wrapped around the edges like a plateful of potluck food. He looked over at Mira, shrugged, and said, “I’ve got cash and a full tank of gas. And now I know where you live. I have people who can help me get the loan repaid if I have to.” He raised and lowered his eyebrows ridiculously, without bothering to smile, and Mira understood instantly, physically (although she couldn’t muster the energy to feel it) why, if the rumors were true, so many girls and women allowed themselves to be used by him.
“Thank you,” she said to him for the tenth or fifteenth time that morning, and he acknowledged it with another shrug, turning back to the book. She offered him a cup of tea, or a sandwich, but he said he’d rather hit the Wendy’s on the freeway if she didn’t mind.
“I have a man-size hunger,” he said. “I’d like to wait for a Bacon-ator if you don’t mind.”
They’d headed together to the parking garage closest to Godwin Hall then. It was a short walk, but the sky was spitting a damp snow, and they had to keep their heads down. It would have been impossible to carry on an easy conversation, even if Mira had been in a state of mind that allowed for small talk.
Jeff was parked on the first floor, under a sign that read, NO PARKING. He pulled the ticket off his windshield and tossed it into the backseat without saying a word about it.
His car was a mess.
Mira had, she supposed, expected a Porsche. Although she knew Jeff couldn’t make much more money than she did, she also found herself so continually surprised by the opulent houses and the exotic vacations of her colleagues (who had the same salaries that, for Mira and Clark, barely covered the rent) that she’d grown used to assuming that most academics had secret sources of income—trust funds, inheritances, law suit settlements. If Jeff were one of those, with that kind of money, Mira had imagined he would spend it on something flashy, something women would be impressed by, like a sports car.
But not only wasn’t this a sports car, it was even rustier and more exhausted-looking than Mira and Clark’s car:
The door of the glove compartment had been torn off somehow, and Jeff had stuffed it with candy wrappers, many of which had fallen on the floor. The backseat was a pond of memos and flyers and Wendy’s bags. (Where, Mira wondered, looking back there, would she put the twins? Clark had their car seats, too, she realized. But she’d have to worry about that later.) It took Jeff several tries to start the car—and once he did, the motor made a sound like a spaceship taking off, only to grow disconcertingly silent as he started to drive. It crossed Mira’s mind that they were actually coasting out of the parking ramp, with no engine at all, but Jeff seemed in control of things, and the confidence he exuded—popping candies into his mouth, fiddling with the ancient-looking radio dial—was reassuring. He said, “I know she doesn’t look like much, but she’s as reliable as they get. We’ll be the fastest thing on the freeway, sweetheart.”
The little endearment did not seem to Mira to be a come-on, or even overly familiar. It seemed, instead, to be an attempt to comfort her—and, again, for the hundredth time that day, tears sprang to her eyes, and she vowed to herself that she would buy that slim collection of his poems she’d seen at the bookstore on the shelf of Local Authors as soon as they got back: The Blind Horizon. She would read them carefully, and ask him about his influences, his inspirations and aspirations. She would treat him with more respect. She was sorry, so sorry, that she hadn’t done so before now.
Jeff flashed his U-Parking pass at the attendant in the booth. Then they were winding their way through campus.
The day was getting colder. The sky, darker. It would be a matter of minutes, Mira felt certain, before the first blizzard of the year began in earnest—and, still, there were boys crossing the street in short sleeves, girls in mini-dresses and tank tops. Was this vanity, ill-preparedness, or did their youth give them some sort of metabolic advantage in the cold?
Mira herself was shivering as Jeff’s car’s heating system blew cool air smelling of dust through the vents and into her face.
Jeff slowed down at an intersection full of pedestrians and bicyclists, and at the corner of State and Seymour, Mira saw Dean Fleming standing under the crosswalk sign, waiting for the signal to change. His red tie had blown over his shoulder, and he had his tweed cap pulled down low on his head of bushy gray hair. He looked, it seemed, right at Mira as they passed—but if he registered who she was and that she was a passenger in Jeff Blackhawk’s junker, it didn’t show on his face. An enormous snowflake landed on the windshield right in front of Mira, and made no sign of melting.
“Freeway? Wendy’s?” Jeff asked.
“Sure, yes,” Mira said. “And, Jeff, I’m so, so grateful for this.”
“I know,” he said, and ground his molars down on the piece of candy in his mouth, turned to her, and winked without smiling.